Chile sacks oceanography chief over failure to issue tsunami warnings

The Chilean government announced that it removed Commander Mariano Rojas over
the lack of tsunami warnings after the country's huge earthquake.

Police officers search for victims on the beach near Pelluhue, some 322 kms southwest of SantiagoPhoto: AP

12:26AM GMT 06 Mar 2010

Cmdr Mariano Rojas, thehead of the Navy's oceanographic service, was asked to step down as the scale of the tsunami damage became clear.

Port captains in several towns issued their own warnings, but a national alert never came, and some say that failure led to deaths.

The tsunami is believed responsible for many of the deaths and damage.

Following the earthquake, military officials admitted an “error of diagnosis” and said they had transmitted “very unclear information” to President Michelle Bachelet on whether to lift or maintain a tsunami alert along the coast.

The Chilean government said 800 people were thought to have died, and they have identified almost 300 bodies in the aftermath of last weekend's 8.8-magnitude quake.

Related Articles

Ms Bachelet said it will take at least three years to rebuild the region wracked by the earthquake and tsunami, and that task is all too clear to the people trying to clean up the ruins of their towns.

In the tourist town of Dichato, a few miles north from the badly-hit city of Concepcion, the quake and tsunami killed at least 19 people and smashed neat wooden houses and small hotels into huge piles of splinters.

Many tourist towns along the southern coast were devastated by tsunamis.

In Constitucion, firefighters were looking for bodies of people swept away by the tsunami as they camped on Isla Orrego, an island in the mouth of the Maure River that flows through the city.

Constitucion suffered perhaps the greatest loss of life in the disaster, in part because many people had come for carnival celebrations and were caught in huge waves that reached the central plaza.